Re: IMAP vs. multipart/signed
Brad Knowles (brad@his.com)
Sun, 25 Feb 1996 00:40:02 -0500
At 12:54 PM 2/24/96, Mark Crispin wrote:
> I think that I suggested one! It is to abandon the idea of signing an
> immutable char* of RFC822/MIME text, and instead sign the *original* form of
> the data (not the 7bit transformed form), along with attributes considered to
> be important enough to be signed.
I want to be able to sign all of the attributes and
guarantee their immutability (or recoverability by standard
methods). How does this fit in with your proposal?
Also, wouldn't the further mutation of objects (after
signing their original form) potentially obscure the
content-type, which would make it harder for IMAP to gain access
to the information about their original forms?
> I'm just musing out loud about the right thing; I really don't want to
> introduce Yet Another Mail Security Format. It just seems to me that the
> security guys consider MIME as something to work *around* instead of work
> *with*, and thus aren't being very creative in their thinking.
Same here, I want to work within MIME, but from the
conversations regarding it that I've overheard (in person at the
workshop, mostly), it seems that it needs some fairly
significant modifications to make it work right when it comes to
security and privacy. And then the question becomes are we
willing to put in the apparently very signficant effort to
change the underlying MIME standard to fit what appears to be
needed, or are we going to work around the way it exists today
to make happen what we need.
-Brad